I work as the VP of Operations for a small manufacturing company. I am an engineer by education, philosopher by choice and I build websites on the side. I don’t know code, or programming for that matter. But I do know a lot and I think a lot of new people who come to the world of building websites are being screwed. That is my opinion.
Here is an example… I knew a freelance writer who had a website. A small, nothing fancy site. I asked her how much she is paying for the site. She said $50 a month plus some money she paid upfront to have the site built. She should be paying about $4.00 a month for that site. Nothing more. She says a “friend” of hers built the site for her. Like Seinfeld says “That’s a shame…”
Here is a bigger one. When I started working at my current company, they had just contracted a major website provider who built a site and an online catalog for $14,000 and were charging $400 a month to host the site. To top it all the back-end of the site where you had to go and make changes to the site or upload new products was so “not” user friendly that we had to go to them to make the changes at $200 /hr. That is a ripoff. We now run a $8.00 a month site with a $1000 software which we paid for once. And we can handle the back-end in minutes. That is $13,000 wasted plus the monthly fees to date.
Here is another one; most online e-commerce packages charge a monthly fee of anywhere between $50 to $200. Some of them are worth it but most are not. There are free solutions for most of these people who want to sell online and there are onetime buy solutions that they should all be aware of. This ripoff goes on everyday and it doesn’t have to. You can build an e-commerce site for free and pay $4.00 month to run it.
I want to scream the truth to people who are out to get a website done… mostly to those small companies and to mom-pop operations… If you are here because you have been referred to me… great. My promise to you is that I will tell you everything I know. If I think I can help I will tell you… If I think I cannot… I will tell you. If we end up working together… one thing is for sure… you will learn how to maintain and use your own site and not have someone else do it with smoke and mirrors and charge you a ton of money.
You can write to me with any questions you have and I will respond, just go to the contact page. Or you can call me – (312) 899-6526.
Thank you for reading. Enjoy your days.
Okan